Luckin Coffee says probe into sales fraud is ‘substantially’ complete

Luckin Coffee said Wednesday that it has “substantially” completed its independent internal probe into the sales fraud scandal that implicated its top executives.

The independent investigation found that the Chinese coffee chain’s 2019 sales were inflated by 2.12 billion yuan ($300 million) and its expenses by 1.34 billion yuan ($190 million) that year. The fraud began in April 2019, a month before Luckin made its public market debut in the United States.

Luckin disclosed the financial scandal and independent probe a year later, estimating that about 2.2 billion yuan of its 2019 sales were fabricated, slightly above the investigation’s eventual findings.

Over the course of the probe,…